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Self-hatred roils in his chest, eating him alive. He trudges to work every morning, feeling despair creeping over every molecule of his body. Kim seems unable to look at him now, only speaks to him when absolutely necessary. Harry doesn’t know if he’s ashamed or afraid.
There had to be a reason for it, some fundamental flaw that made him unlovable. Why else would Kim fuck Jean behind his back? Or did Jean fuck Kim?
He couldn’t get it out of his mind, the image of them rutting together, skin slick with sweat, grunting and cursing, fingernails scratching into skin, fingers tugging on hair…over and over and over his mind played a theater of every possible joining they may have had.
Weeks had passed since that day and Harry barely spoke a word to either of them, preferring to work alone.
Lately, he often wandered down streets that some deep portion of his brain told him were “dangerous” or “suicidal for a cop to frequent.” He did it anyway, moving past groups of shady, sharp-eyed individuals. The ones who called him names or followed him threateningly weren’t the ones to be concerned with.
No.
The dangerous ones were the ones who lingered in shadows, who watched as he trudged to places that not even the bravest cops dared venture.
He is not brave.
He is seeking the void that constantly calls him.
He feels, deep inside, that there was once an answering void, a well of darkness and despair that he could wallow in – burying himself inside of.
Lighting a cigarette, Harry leans against an alley wall next to a known Madre hangout.
A large man steps out only a moment later, muscular form clad in leather and faded denim. He eyes Harry up and down.
Glancing to his hand, Harry sees a thin, shining wire there, with wooden handles at either end. The thing is coiled like a snake, but filled with violent potential. Make the wrong move, any wrong move, and he’ll be well on his way to a final, gasping end. He imagines for a moment the way the cord will slice across his trachea, the way he’ll pant and struggle, squealing or hissing, fingers fumbling uselessly at the sharp wire as life’s breath is denied him. Vaguely, he wonders if he’ll piss himself.
Well. He’s spat into the face of God before, why not the devil’s now?
The man tenses when Harry reaches into his jacket. He pulls his pack of cigarettes out, raising one brow.
“Hmm?” Harry asks. A line appears between the man’s brows. Harry doesn’t wait for an answer, takes a cigarette out and tosses it to him.
He catches it.
“The fuck are you here for?” the man says in a gravelly voice, and though it is soft, it is filled with menace. Nevertheless, he holds a hand out and Harry drops his lighter into it. The metal case reads ‘Shitkid of the Decade’ in engraved scripted letters.
“Thought I might want to die today,” Harry says simply.
The man blows smoke out through his nostrils, tips his head in clear amusement. A facial shrug crosses his features.
“I can arrange that, cochino ,” he says, eyeing the tell-tale holographic patches on Harry’s shoulders with distaste. Cops that wander up this street are never heard from again. Harry knows it, this guy knows it. Harry watches the man’s face, a thrill rising at the idea that he’s about to die. The thought of this ending is delightful. His heart rate ticks up and he can feel his pupils dilate with something approaching profane arousal in anticipation of death.
The man’s eyes flick over Harry’s shoulder, his face stiffening.
Harry turns and sees a tall figure outlined by a distant streetlamp that flickers and buzzes eerily, sending a message from the Pale, perhaps, reminding Harry of the proximity of oblivion. At the end of the alley, red and blue lights oscillate.
“Harry, what the fuck are you doing down here?” the figure asks, voice shaking.
It’s Jean. He’s got his gun out, pointed toward the Madre member.
“What the fuck is this?” the man snarls, cigarette discarded and immediately forgotten.
“Jean, get the hell out of here. Fuck off!”
It’s the last thing Harry says before the garrote is around his neck, the man right behind him, solid against his back.
“Don’t fucking move, pig. Put the gun down.”
“Fuck you,” Jean snaps.
“Jean. Just go,” Harry tells him, gaze empty as he stares at Jean’s thin, pallid face.
“What the hell is this, Harry?” The younger man’s ghostly gray eyes are wide with terror, his brows furrowed, mottled skin pale. “You don’t have a reason to be here, you insane asshole!”
“You fucking gave me one, Jean. Now fuck off.” Harry’s voice goes rough with this accusation and some voice in his mind argues that perhaps that wasn’t entirely fair. If he dies and Jean doesn’t, Jean will have to bear that burden for the rest of his life.
Good, answers another internal voice and Harry’s crooked jaw grinds.
“No,” Jean says after a pause. “I’m not going to let you do this to yourself.”
He twitches and the garrote tightens. Harry scrabbles at it, predictable in his desire to live, despite his desire to die.*
When he was nine, Harry came upon the recently car struck corpse of a dog with a group of friends. Despite his recent bout of amnesia, the jolt of shock as he faces his death causes the memory to resurface. He remembers looking down at the mess of fur and ligaments and claws.
The thing was half-rolled up, like a badly maintained carpet, matted and bloody. It was not the first time he had encountered death, but it was the first time he had seen such a grisly example of it in plain view. This time there was no adult to pull him away, or to distract him from staring at it, his cheeks red with an inexplicable emotion. His knees had felt weak and his head light. Squatting down, he had plucked a stick from the ground. Very gingerly, he had poked the animal.
It jolted in place with a shriek and he had fallen backwards onto his rump, heart thundering in his thin chest. Even in the grip of death, the thing fought, broken jaw snapping uselessly. Its limbs thrashed, desperate, road-burnt paws scrambling at the ground, a horrifying wheeze spilling from its mangled throat. One glassy eye remained on one side of its head, staring accusingly at him as it twitched.
The scattered, repulsed murmurs of a dozen boys had filled the grim air around Harry as the thing stiffened and gurgled.
One of the boys, perhaps fifteen, had approached and slammed the heel of his boot into the remains of the dog’s head, granting it a merciful end.
The thin, sallow-faced teenager picked the thing up and shoved it into his bag. At the sound of outcry, he had remarked, “Meat is meat.” What was once a living, breathing dog was first a mangled ball of torment, and then a week’s worth of food for a scrawny teenager. It had stuck with Harry, even years later, the mutilated, vicious horror of it, the pointlessness of its death and then the purpose found in its carcass.
** As the thickening edges of his vision turn black and his mind begins to fail him, Harry hears an aggressive, terrified voice in his mind giggle. Meat is meat. You’re meat, Harry.
Darkness overtakes him, and he embraces it.
-
Harry awakens in an MC with a jolt, head spinning. The smell of cigarette smoke wafts over him and he rouses, blinking owlishly. All at once, the despair rushes back. So he didn’t die. He sits up, rubbing his neck. There’s raw skin there, it burns to touch it, and his throat feels like it’s on fire when he swallows, but he can still breathe normally, no wheeze on inhalation. Sitting up, he meets Jean’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“What the hell were you thinking, Harry?” he asks, voice low and distressed. He’s smoking a cigarette, the caverns under his eyes dark purple in the light of streetlamps they drive past.
Harry says nothing.
“What a fucking shit show. What a goddamned fucking mess. I barely got us out of there. God, Harry. What the fuck?” Jean pauses, his breaths coming fast and his voice slightly higher than usual with tense nerves. “I killed him, you know? For you.”
“You shouldn’t have,” Harry rasps hoarsely, tugging at the handle of the MC door. “Fuck you. Let me out.”
“No, fuck you. I’m taking you home.”
Harry gives no argument. Despair gives way to rage. He watches Jean in the rearview mirror, staring at the side of his morose face. The pockmarked visage had once brought him comfort, but now all he can imagine are those lips wrapped around Kim’s cock, or his brow knitted in concentration as he fucks Kim roughly.
Harry’s stomach flip flops and a dozen voices fill his mind with a cacophony of suggestions. When Jean parks the MC, Harry gets out on his own. He doesn’t know why, but Jean follows him up the stairs to his apartment door.
Harry’s still deciding what he wants to do, if he’s going to go inside and put a bullet in his own brain, or if he’s going to throw Jean off the four story drop and hope the fall snaps his spine.
Harry unlocks his door and walks into the poorly lit den that is his home. It reeks of cigarette ash, sweat and despondency.
Jean, for reasons Harry cannot surmise, steps inside after him and closes the door.
It’s like being followed by an overlarge stray dog begging for scraps, tail between its legs, only the very end wagging hopefully, praying it will receive a pat and not a kick.
Harry turns and stares at Jean, pure vitriol overtaking him, burning in his throat worse than the bruising from the garrote.
His own fist surprises him as it crashes into Jean’s jaw, the taller man jolting back with a loud “oomph” sound, his back careening into the door hard enough to shake it on its hinges. Without another moment of thought, Harry throws himself at Jean, slamming his fist into his temple this time, and then into his belly. Jean cries out in pain, but it only takes a moment for him to gain his footing.
A small, oddly familiar smile crosses Jean’s face, a glint of bloody teeth revealed before he wipes his mouth on his sleeve. He swings wide with a sloppy haymaker, the movement almost playful, but Harry steps back out of the way, hearing the soft whoosh of air as Jean’s fist flies past his nose. Harry aims another blow at Jean’s sternum, then knees him in the belly again and Jean staggers backwards, nearly overwhelmed by the onslaught of unbridled rage Harry has loosed.
He’s not sure if he’s angry at Jean, or himself, or Kim or the entire world.
It doesn’t matter.
He’s going to kill Jean, of that much he is certain.
The thinner man avoids another punch, landing one of his own against Harry’s chin, but he barely feels it aside from the click of his teeth together and the taste of blood filling his mouth a moment later. Why does Jean seem to think this is a game? He’s pulling his punches.
Harry isn’t.
He swings, his fist hitting hard against muscle and bone and he hears Jean wheeze. Jean attacks again, aiming for Harry’s liver, but he misses by a wide margin, fist colliding harmlessly against soft fat and Harry grabs him by his greasy mop of salt n’ pepper hair, slinging him around by it.
Jean’s fingernails claw at Harry’s arm, but he ignores it, using their joint momentum to slam Jean into the wall. The apartment shudders and Jean makes a pitiful sound, but he stays standing, though mostly because of Harry’s grip on his hair. Harry tips Jean’s head up, meets his eyes.
“Why?”
Jean knows exactly what he’s talking about.
“You…know…why,” Jean gasps out, spitting a gob of saliva and blood onto the filthy carpet. Based on the number of rust-colored stains already there, it’s apparent this was not the first time something like that had been deposited on the threadbare material.
Harry releases Jean’s hair and grabs him by the throat instead with both hands, fingers wrapping around his trachea, seeking out the pulse on either side of his neck to cut it off with firm, calculated pressure, Jean’s back pinned against the wall.
Harry watches Jean’s gray eyes go wide, sees real fear there now where there had been none before.
This isn’t how the game is played…
They used to do this.
Frequently.
And then they’d…
Harry’s hands tighten on Jean’s throat and Jean’s hands go to his wrists, struggling with him, his fingernails clawing uselessly as he attempts to free himself, mouth gaping and eyes rolling wildly in their sockets.
“Harry…please,” he gasps without air. He must know that Harry is the stronger of the two of them, the more deranged, the one more willing to kill and be killed.
For a brief moment, Jean stops thrashing and meets Harry’s eyes, stark terror in his gaze. Then his expression shifts, relaxes. He looks almost beatific, his eyes softening, mouth relaxing.
Jean’s body goes limp, not from unconsciousness, but because the fight has gone out of him. The acceptance of death is in his gaze.
We are just two sides of the same coin, you and I, Harry thinks suddenly, face and grip slackening.
Jean sucks in a loud breath and starts hacking, gasping for air, one hand on his throat, the other on his knee, holding himself upright, though bent in half. Harry pats him once on the back, twice, muscle memory.
Harry steps back, also out of breath and silent tears slip down his face, absorbing into his facial hair. He shudders. After a long moment, Jean gets back upright, collecting himself.
He lunges toward Harry, but not to fight. Instead, he cups Harry’s jaw in his hands, their bloodied lips pressing together.
In Harry’s mind is one thought – I don’t want to be alone in this misery.
He softens into the kiss, tasting Jean’s blood mingling with his own.
Pulling back, Jean shudders, catching his gaze though their foreheads are still touching. His eyes are wet and his face is blotchy and bruised, a bruise in the shape of Harry’s hands on his long neck.
“I fucking hate you,” he says raggedly.
“I fucking hate you too,” Harry answers, and as though a sewage dam has broken, their toxicity overwhelms them in a flood of mutual disgust, longing and lust.
The darkest variety of “I’m not glad I’m still alive, but I am and I’m surprised about it” overtakes both of them. This isn’t a celebration of being alive, it’s a ritual act that occurs every time they manage to pry their own death out of the hands of others.
Jean yanks at his black, faux silk tie, but Harry grabs it in his fist so tightly his knuckles go white.
“Leave it on,” he growls, and the phrase is, again, familiar. How many times had it gone like this? The overwhelming terror of losing one another and then mutual destruction to ensure that the only person who could kill them was each other?
Harry reaches down and unzips his fly, pulling out his heavy cock and stroking it to attention. Without being asked, Jean goes to his knees.
“Whore,” Harry growls. The epithet seems like a rehearsed line from a play and he has no idea why, but Jean does, laughs once.
“Always the same jokes with you, f----t.”
Harry shoves his cock against Jean’s mouth without further preamble and Jean winces as it slides against a cut on his lip. Reaching down, Harry grabs him by the chin, squeezing, pressing the place below the cut with his thumb so that blood and spit oozes onto his cock. Jean’s gray eyes are predatory, but filled with longing.
Never has a dog so badly wanted to be rewarded for being beaten.
Harry presses his hips forward until Jean gags, his eyes watering as he continues to meet Harry’s eyes, his mouth and throat full of cock. He sucks, gurgling around the girth and Harry takes a shaky breath. He grabs Jean’s tie and tugs it upwards, seeing rising panic in Jean’s gaze as he is, for a second time this evening, deprived of oxygen. Harry releases it and Jean sucks in a breath through his nose just in time for Harry to thrust down his throat, grabbing at the soft hair on the back of Jean’s head to hold him in place.
“Dog. You’re a fucking dog. An actual, factual son-of-a-bitch,” Harry tells him, bearing down on him, bending Jean’s spine backwards so that he topples and sprawls onto the floor, Harry following him down, one knee on either side of Jean’s ribs, pinning him there. Harry fucks his mouth roughly, breathing roughly past bruises on his own throat. Jean’s eyes water and at some point turn to true tears, sniveling and gasping around Harry, sobbing quietly to himself.
Are you mourning what was or what is? Harry wonders.
Backing off, he pulls his cock from Jean’s mouth, letting him catch his breath.
Jean rams the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, rubbing at them roughly, trying to hide tears as though Harry could miss the way his shoulders are trembling.
There is a war within Harry.
On one side is the enraged, hurt portion of him that wants to use Jean’s tears and blood for lube, that wants to fuck him within an inch of his life, tell him to get out and then demand he be transferred to another department.
But then there is the other portion of him, the side that remembers deep affection for this fucked up excuse for a human being, that remembers, however vaguely, that they had depended on one another for everything. Once, it had been them against the world. And then he’d lost his memory and Jean with it.
“Do you want a drink?” he asks, voice rough, gravelly past the damage to his throat.
“Yes,” Jean forces through a sob.
Harry searches through cabinets and beneath couch cushions, finally finding a “rainy day” liquor bottle Kim and Judit hadn’t managed to locate and discard. He cracks it open, brings it to his lips, pauses. It’s a novelty-size bottle, the equivalent of perhaps four shots. He smells the heady, caustic aroma of cheap liquor, mouth watering before he caps it and tosses it to Jean.
“All yours.”
Jean downs it as Harry watches, focused on the way his neck bobs up and down. When he finishes, he tosses the bottle aside and looks up at Harry, face red and eyes angry and still watery with tears.
“You could have died, you fucking asshole.”
“I wish I had,” Harry says simply.
“Nothing ever changes with you, does it? Still the same suicidal bastard,” Jean growls, getting to his feet, his dour expression and staggering steps making him look truly pathetic.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Harry recalls nights just like this one, where one of them did something stupid, nearly got them both killed and then…teeth and tongue and thrusting violently into one another.
Harry raises his hand and Jean flinches. His palm rests against the younger man’s cheek, his thumb rubbing a soothing track, back and forth across rough textured skin. Jean looks down, but Harry tips his chin up, feeling his wiry goatee. He frowns slightly, studying Jean’s face. He is eaten up with guilt and pain, his gray eyes distant and sad.
“Why did we used to do it? Was it love?” Harry asks.
Jean snorts, pulls away.
“The farthest fucking thing from it. It was hate and loneliness. Fucking...co-dependency.” He lets out a sigh that seems to deflate him, to make him small and powerless in the face of Harry’s complacency toward death. “I should go.”
Harry takes Jean’s hand, opening the fingers and running the tip of one of his own over Jean’s lifeline, a stuttered mess across his palm. His fingers are spotted with gunpowder, the little black speckles a tell-tale sign that Jean killed a man for him earlier this evening.
Loyal to the last, despite neglect.
Good dog.
“Stay.”
Jean stares at him, eyes wet, chapped lips slightly open and trembling.
Harry doesn’t wait for him to agree, just saunters to his bedroom. The rage from earlier has subsided, replaced with loneliness and a terrible grief that he is still alive.
Predictably, Jean follows.
Wordless, Harry loosens his tie and discards it, meeting Jean’s eyes in the dimly lit room. Jean is trembling all over, shaking like one of those little dogs from Mesque with bug eyes and neuroses. Harry holds Jean’s gaze as he strips and he sees Jean’s brow soften, sees his eyes take in Harry’s form. He had stopped drinking. He had gotten off most of the drugs. Until Jean fucked Kim, anyway. Still, he looks better now than he had in a long time, much of the bloating gone since he had reined in the habits.
Harry steps toward Jean, utterly unselfconscious of his own nudity. His large cock hangs heavily between his legs, still half-erect from their earlier activities. Jean shudders as Harry’s big hands go to his neck again, this time loosening his tie, taking it off him. He unbuttons Jean’s shirt, cool and professional. Next, his belt. His undershirt. Harry’s eyes graze over large pectoral muscles, nipples raised to pointed nubs in the coolness of his apartment. A fine haze of black hair over his chest, down his belly to a thatch of soft, curly hair above a modestly-sized cock that seems utterly disinterested in current goings-on.
Jean’s cock is flaccid and pulled tightly against his body, the foreskin wrinkled snugly around it as though trying to hide its very existence.
Distantly, something in Harry’s mind tells him that the depression medication Jean takes might prevent his arousal. Well. It didn’t stop him from fucking Kim, did it?
Harry grabs the whole of Jean’s scrotum, cock, balls, all of it, squeezing until Jean whimpers and takes a step toward him to remove the pressure. Inside Harry’s grip, Jean’s cock begins to stiffen.
“You liked that, didn’t you? Hmm?” Harry asks, applying more pressure when Jean doesn’t answer immediately.
“Y-yes.”
Harry reaches his free hand to pinch one of Jean’s nipples and hears a soft sound pour from his throat.
“Get on the bed,” Harry says and Jean complies, lying on his back. He pulls his legs up so that his knees are on either side of his ears, starts to stretch himself after wetting his fingers in his mouth. “Fuck,” Harry murmurs. “How often did we do this that you’re…so well trained?”
Jean doesn’t meet his eyes.
“Just shut up and fuck me,” he says, self-loathing and anger in his voice.
“Jean,” Harry says softly, and all at once a sort of pity wells up in him.
Jean is a dog that got dumped on the side of the road. Is it surprising that he bites after all the beatings he received when he was loyal?
“Put your legs down, Vic.”
Jean frowns, obeys.
Harry thinks of the times he and Kim had slept together, thinks of the careful, gentle way Kim opened him up and worshiped his body. He thinks of how the delicate touches were so unbearable, bringing him to tears the first time Kim had fucked him.
What better revenge could he get than to give Jean the treatment he so badly needed, even if he doesn’t want it?
Harry pulls out a bottle of lube and reaches his hand between Jean’s legs, lifting one. Jean’s body is tight, hard with muscle and repressed fear. Harry has to spread his cheeks with his fingers to gain access to the pink, wrinkled hole surrounded by dusky black hair. He touches Jean’s hole and gently pushes inward. His finger slides in easily, Jean moving just slightly to accommodate him.
“The fuck are you doing, Harry?” Jean asks, not understanding. Harry thinks he must never have granted him this courtesy. He doesn’t answer Jean’s question, but works him open, watching as his belly and chest rise and fall in little jerks as he finds the hard nub inside of Jean, watches his cock harden more. His mouth drops open and he takes a hard breath. “Harry, what the fuck, just fuck me and let’s be done already.”
“No,” is all Harry says as he continues.
Harry takes Jean into his mouth and feels Jean tugging at his hair, urgently trying to get his mouth away from his cock.
“Don’t fucking bite me,” he yelps almost hysterically.
What kind of person did I used to be? Harry wonders. How many times have I hurt him while I was really trying to hurt myself?
Harry puts a gentling hand on Jean’s belly, holding him in place as he slides his eyes closed and begins pleasuring Jean with his mouth, sucking and sloshing saliva around its length, swallowing when it pulses and pre-cum oozes from its tip.
At last, Harry turns Jean on his side, getting behind him, his chest to Jean’s back. He presses his cock between Jean’s cheeks and lifts Jean’s upper leg, sliding into him with a muffled groan.
Jean pants and squirms, but stills when Harry grabs him around his chest, bracing him in place against his own chest.
“Shh,” he soothes, and he begins a steady, careful rhythm into and out of Jean. “Does that feel good?” he asks.
Jean doesn’t respond and Harry can feel him shaking, is unsure if he’s afraid or excited or angry.
“What the fuck is this, Harry?” Jean breathes.
“Shh,” Harry shushes him again. He’s making a point. Jean will get it.
Reaching a hand down, he pumps Jean’s cock in time with his thrusts, kisses Jean behind his ear.
“You’re okay,” he murmurs. “It’s okay.”
“What?” Jean breathes, his voice thick.
Harry pulls him in closer.
“Come here. It’s okay.”
“Don’t,” Jean insists over a sob. “Don’t fucking do this to me. We don’t do this, this isn’t…”
“You’re a good dog, Jean,” Harry tells him without irony and Jean shudders.
“Fuck you.”
“Jean,” Harry says, very seriously, “how did you fuck Kim?”
Jean makes a noise of contempt and throws his head back, seeming to search for words for a moment.
“Why are we talking about this right now, I…what the fuck, Harry, have you lost your fucking mind?”
“How did you fuck him? Hmm? Rough, like we used to?”
“I didn’t fuck Kim,” Jean says, turning his head into the mattress, his face going red and his cock softening slightly with shame. Harry continues the gentle, almost loving movement of his hips, keeps his rhythm on Jean’s cock, kissing down his neck.
To an animal used to abuse, tenderness feels like torment.
Jean curls in on himself, his back pulling away from Harry’s chest. He buries his head in his hands and shudders. He’s crying softly.
“Stop, please stop this, Harry. I don’t…”
He doesn’t say it, because it doesn’t need saying: “I don’t deserve this.”
“Shh, shh, shh,” Harry says, petting Jean’s hair as he keeps fucking him. Jean’s sobs turn to weeping, loud cries of despair as he tries to pull away from Harry, but Harry doesn’t let him escape. He turns him onto his belly on the mattress and pins him in place with his bulk.
Keeping his strokes calculated, gentle, Harry brushes Jean’s hair out of his eyes.
“Why are you crying, Vic?”
“Because I’m a fucking piece of shit,” Jean snivels.
“Hmm.”
“I’m…I’m sorry,” Jean forces out through clenched teeth.
Harry pumps his hips upwards, fucking deep inside of Jean, grabbing at his sides to plow into him deeper.
“He was the best thing that ever happened to me. And you had to fuck it up. You ruin everything you touch, Jean,” Harry says through hard breaths.
Harry lifts them both up, holding Jean upright and reaching around his narrow waist to grasp his cock again, pumping it as he increases his pace. Jean lets out a little whine every time Harry’s cock brushes his prostate. It’s coming back to him, the memory of the angle and speed that Jean always liked.
So also comes the memory of a dozen dozen nights spent fucking the shit out of each other, fighting, biting, clawing, trying everything in their power to destroy one another because at least if they hurt each other instead of themselves they wouldn’t be alone in their misery.
With a strangled cry Jean comes over Harry’s fist, his whole body clenching. Harry follows him with a grunt, fucking into him until he starts to go soft. He releases Jean to drop onto the bed where Jean lays there curled up on himself, almost catatonic.
“What the fuck was that?” Jean demands after a moment, voice tight, looking at Harry over his shoulder, his face aghast.
“The last time,” Harry tells him, getting up and lighting a cigarette.
Jean sits up, going pale.
“What?”
Harry stares at him, takes a drag and blows out smoke, shrugging as though it’s the most trivial matter in the world.
“You wanted this again, right? You got it. But this was the last time. All of this? It’s done. And look, for the record, I forgive you. I do, Vic. I get why you did it, but I can’t hate you any less for understanding it.” Harry sighs, scuffs a hand over his face, thinking of a mangled, road-killed dog and a swift kick to the head to end it all. “Get dressed and get out. Don’t come here again. And the next time I try to kill myself, don’t intervene or I’ll take you with me, understood?”
Jean’s expression is etched with horror. He nods shakily, swallowing with an audible click.
“Yeah, Harry, I got it.”
He grabs his clothes, pulling them on quickly and fleeing without a second glance.